Efficient Unsupervised Image Stitching Using Attention Mechanism with Deep Homography Estimation

Traditional feature-based image stitching techniques often encounter obstacles when dealing with images lackingunique attributes or suffering from quality degradation. The scarcity of annotated datasets in real-life scenesseverely undermines the reliability of supervised learning methods in image stitching. Furthermore, existing deeplearning architectures designed for image stitching are often too bulky to be deployed on mobile and peripheralcomputing devices. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel unsupervised image stitching methodbased on the YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once version 8) framework that introduces deep homography networksand attentionmechanisms. Themethodology is partitioned into three distinct stages. The initial stage combines theattention mechanism with a pooling pyramid model to enhance the detection and recognition of compact objectsin images, the task of the deep homography networks module is to estimate the global homography of the inputimages consideringmultiple viewpoints. The second stage involves preliminary stitching of the masks generated inthe initial stage and further enhancement through weighted computation to eliminate common stitching artifacts.The final stage is characterized by adaptive reconstruction and careful refinement of the initial stitching results.Comprehensive experiments acrossmultiple datasets are executed tometiculously assess the proposed model. Ourmethod’s Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) improved by 10.6%and 6%. These experimental results confirm the efficacy and utility of the presented model in this paper.

Enhancing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification with the Minimal Transfer Cost Framework

In Unsupervised Domain Adaptation(UDA)for person re-identification(re-ID),the primary challenge is reducing the distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains.This can be achieved by implicitly or explicitly constructing an appropriate intermediate domain to enhance recognition capability on the target domain.Implicit construction is difficult due to the absence of intermediate state supervision,making smooth knowledge transfer from the source to the target domain a challenge.To explicitly construct the most suitable intermediate domain for the model to gradually adapt to the feature distribution changes from the source to the target domain,we propose the Minimal Transfer Cost Framework(MTCF).MTCF considers all scenarios of the intermediate domain during the transfer process,ensuring smoother and more efficient domain alignment.Our framework mainly includes threemodules:Intermediate Domain Generator(IDG),Cross-domain Feature Constraint Module(CFCM),and Residual Channel Space Module(RCSM).First,the IDG Module is introduced to generate all possible intermediate domains,ensuring a smooth transition of knowledge fromthe source to the target domain.To reduce the cross-domain feature distribution discrepancy,we propose the CFCM Module,which quantifies the difficulty of knowledge transfer and ensures the diversity of intermediate domain features and their semantic relevance,achieving alignment between the source and target domains by incorporating mutual information and maximum mean discrepancy.We also design the RCSM,which utilizes attention mechanism to enhance the model’s focus on personnel features in low-resolution images,improving the accuracy and efficiency of person re-ID.Our proposed method outperforms existing technologies in all common UDA re-ID tasks and improves the Mean Average Precision(mAP)by 2.3%in the Market to Duke task compared to the state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods.

Unsupervised Color Segmentation with Reconstructed Spatial Weighted Gaussian Mixture Model and Random Color Histogram

Image classification and unsupervised image segmentation can be achieved using the Gaussian mixture model.Although the Gaussian mixture model enhances the flexibility of image segmentation,it does not reflect spatial information and is sensitive to the segmentation parameter.In this study,we first present an efficient algorithm that incorporates spatial information into the Gaussian mixture model(GMM)without parameter estimation.The proposed model highlights the residual region with considerable information and constructs color saliency.Second,we incorporate the content-based color saliency as spatial information in the Gaussian mixture model.The segmentation is performed by clustering each pixel into an appropriate component according to the expectation maximization and maximum criteria.Finally,the random color histogram assigns a unique color to each cluster and creates an attractive color by default for segmentation.A random color histogram serves as an effective tool for data visualization and is instrumental in the creation of generative art,facilitating both analytical and aesthetic objectives.For experiments,we have used the Berkeley segmentation dataset BSDS-500 and Microsoft Research in Cambridge dataset.In the study,the proposed model showcases notable advancements in unsupervised image segmentation,with probabilistic rand index(PRI)values reaching 0.80,BDE scores as low as 12.25 and 12.02,compactness variations at 0.59 and 0.7,and variation of information(VI)reduced to 2.0 and 1.49 for the BSDS-500 and MSRC datasets,respectively,outperforming current leading-edge methods and yielding more precise segmentations.

Unsupervised Multi-Expert Learning Model for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater image enhancement aims to restore a clean appearance and thus improves the quality of underwater degraded images.Current methods feed the whole image directly into the model for enhancement.However,they ignored that the R,G and B channels of underwater degraded images present varied degrees of degradation,due to the selective absorption for the light.To address this issue,we propose an unsupervised multi-expert learning model by considering the enhancement of each color channel.Specifically,an unsupervised architecture based on generative adversarial network is employed to alleviate the need for paired underwater images.Based on this,we design a generator,including a multi-expert encoder,a feature fusion module and a feature fusion-guided decoder,to generate the clear underwater image.Accordingly,a multi-expert discriminator is proposed to verify the authenticity of the R,G and B channels,respectively.In addition,content perceptual loss and edge loss are introduced into the loss function to further improve the content and details of the enhanced images.Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves more pleasing results in vision quality.Various metrics(PSNR,SSIM,UIQM and UCIQE) evaluated on our enhanced images have been improved obviously.

Cross-Dimension Attentive Feature Fusion Network for Unsupervised Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is crucial in various industrial applications to identify unusual behaviors within the time series data.Due to the challenges associated with annotating anomaly events,time series reconstruction has become a prevalent approach for unsupervised anomaly detection.However,effectively learning representations and achieving accurate detection results remain challenging due to the intricate temporal patterns and dependencies in real-world time series.In this paper,we propose a cross-dimension attentive feature fusion network for time series anomaly detection,referred to as CAFFN.Specifically,a series and feature mixing block is introduced to learn representations in 1D space.Additionally,a fast Fourier transform is employed to convert the time series into 2D space,providing the capability for 2D feature extraction.Finally,a cross-dimension attentive feature fusion mechanism is designed that adaptively integrates features across different dimensions for anomaly detection.Experimental results on real-world time series datasets demonstrate that CAFFN performs better than other competing methods in time series anomaly detection.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence-Based Model Drift Detection Applicable to Unsupervised Environments

Cybersecurity increasingly relies on machine learning(ML)models to respond to and detect attacks.However,the rapidly changing data environment makes model life-cycle management after deployment essential.Real-time detection of drift signals from various threats is fundamental for effectively managing deployed models.However,detecting drift in unsupervised environments can be challenging.This study introduces a novel approach leveraging Shapley additive explanations(SHAP),a widely recognized explainability technique in ML,to address drift detection in unsupervised settings.The proposed method incorporates a range of plots and statistical techniques to enhance drift detection reliability and introduces a drift suspicion metric that considers the explanatory aspects absent in the current approaches.To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real-world scenario,we applied it to an environment designed to detect domain generation algorithms(DGAs).The dataset was obtained from various types of DGAs provided by NetLab.Based on this dataset composition,we sought to validate the proposed SHAP-based approach through drift scenarios that occur when a previously deployed model detects new data types in an environment that detects real-world DGAs.The results revealed that more than 90%of the drift data exceeded the threshold,demonstrating the high reliability of the approach to detect drift in an unsupervised environment.The proposed method distinguishes itself fromexisting approaches by employing explainable artificial intelligence(XAI)-based detection,which is not limited by model or system environment constraints.In conclusion,this paper proposes a novel approach to detect drift in unsupervised ML settings for cybersecurity.The proposed method employs SHAP-based XAI and a drift suspicion metric to improve drift detection reliability.It is versatile and suitable for various realtime data analysis contexts beyond DGA detection environments.This study significantly contributes to theMLcommunity by addressing the critical issue of managing ML models in real-world cybersecurity settings.Our approach is distinguishable from existing techniques by employing XAI-based detection,which is not limited by model or system environment constraints.As a result,our method can be applied in critical domains that require adaptation to continuous changes,such as cybersecurity.Through extensive validation across diverse settings beyond DGA detection environments,the proposed method will emerge as a versatile drift detection technique suitable for a wide range of real-time data analysis contexts.It is also anticipated to emerge as a new approach to protect essential systems and infrastructures from attacks.

A structural developmental neural network with information saturation for continual unsupervised learning

In this paper,we propose a structural developmental neural network to address the plasticity‐stability dilemma,computational inefficiency,and lack of prior knowledge in continual unsupervised learning.This model uses competitive learning rules and dynamic neurons with information saturation to achieve parameter adjustment and adaptive structure development.Dynamic neurons adjust the information saturation after winning the competition and use this parameter to modulate the neuron parameter adjustment and the division timing.By dividing to generate new neurons,the network not only keeps sensitive to novel features but also can subdivide classes learnt repeatedly.The dynamic neurons with information saturation and division mechanism can simulate the long short‐term memory of the human brain,which enables the network to continually learn new samples while maintaining the previous learning results.The parent‐child relationship between neurons arising from neuronal division enables the network to simulate the human cognitive process that gradually refines the perception of objects.By setting the clustering layer parameter,users can choose the desired degree of class subdivision.Experimental results on artificial and real‐world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is feasible for unsupervised learning tasks in instance increment and class incre-ment scenarios and outperforms prior structural developmental neural networks.

An Efficient Encrypted Speech Retrieval Based on Unsupervised Hashing and B+ Tree Dynamic Index

Existing speech retrieval systems are frequently confronted with expanding volumes of speech data.The dynamic updating strategy applied to construct the index can timely process to add or remove unnecessary speech data to meet users’real-time retrieval requirements.This study proposes an efficient method for retrieving encryption speech,using unsupervised deep hashing and B+ tree dynamic index,which avoid privacy leak-age of speech data and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of retrieval.The cloud’s encryption speech library is constructed by using the multi-threaded Dijk-Gentry-Halevi-Vaikuntanathan(DGHV)Fully Homomorphic Encryption(FHE)technique,which encrypts the original speech.In addition,this research employs Residual Neural Network18-Gated Recurrent Unit(ResNet18-GRU),which is used to learn the compact binary hash codes,store binary hash codes in the designed B+tree index table,and create a mapping relation of one to one between the binary hash codes and the corresponding encrypted speech.External B+tree index technology is applied to achieve dynamic index updating of the B+tree index table,thereby satisfying users’needs for real-time retrieval.The experimental results on THCHS-30 and TIMIT showed that the retrieval accuracy of the proposed method is more than 95.84%compared to the existing unsupervised hashing methods.The retrieval efficiency is greatly improved.Compared to the method of using hash index tables,and the speech data’s security is effectively guaranteed.

Contrastive Clustering for Unsupervised Recognition of Interference Signals

Interference signals recognition plays an important role in anti-jamming communication.With the development of deep learning,many supervised interference signals recognition algorithms based on deep learning have emerged recently and show better performance than traditional recognition algorithms.However,there is no unsupervised interference signals recognition algorithm at present.In this paper,an unsupervised interference signals recognition method called double phases and double dimensions contrastive clustering(DDCC)is proposed.Specifically,in the first phase,four data augmentation strategies for interference signals are used in data-augmentation-based(DA-based)contrastive learning.In the second phase,the original dataset’s k-nearest neighbor set(KNNset)is designed in double dimensions contrastive learning.In addition,a dynamic entropy parameter strategy is proposed.The simulation experiments of 9 types of interference signals show that random cropping is the best one of the four data augmentation strategies;the feature dimensional contrastive learning in the second phase can improve the clustering purity;the dynamic entropy parameter strategy can improve the stability of DDCC effectively.The unsupervised interference signals recognition results of DDCC and five other deep clustering algorithms show that the clustering performance of DDCC is superior to other algorithms.In particular,the clustering purity of our method is above 92%,SCAN’s is 81%,and the other three methods’are below 71%when jammingnoise-ratio(JNR)is−5 dB.In addition,our method is close to the supervised learning algorithm.

Genetic Algorithm Combined with the K-Means Algorithm:A Hybrid Technique for Unsupervised Feature Selection

The dimensionality of data is increasing very rapidly,which creates challenges for most of the current mining and learning algorithms,such as large memory requirements and high computational costs.The literature includes much research on feature selection for supervised learning.However,feature selection for unsupervised learning has only recently been studied.Finding the subset of features in unsupervised learning that enhances the performance is challenging since the clusters are indeterminate.This work proposes a hybrid technique for unsupervised feature selection called GAk-MEANS,which combines the genetic algorithm(GA)approach with the classical k-Means algorithm.In the proposed algorithm,a new fitness func-tion is designed in addition to new smart crossover and mutation operators.The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated on various datasets.Fur-thermore,the performance of GAk-MEANS has been compared with other genetic algorithms,such as the genetic algorithm using the Sammon Error Function and the genetic algorithm using the Sum of Squared Error Function.Additionally,the performance of GAk-MEANS is compared with the state-of-the-art statistical unsupervised feature selection techniques.Experimental results show that GAk-MEANS consistently selects subsets of features that result in better classification accuracy compared to others.In particular,GAk-MEANS is able to significantly reduce the size of the subset of selected features by an average of 86.35%(72%–96.14%),which leads to an increase of the accuracy by an average of 3.78%(1.05%–6.32%)compared to using all features.When compared with the genetic algorithm using the Sammon Error Function,GAk-MEANS is able to reduce the size of the subset of selected features by 41.29%on average,improve the accuracy by 5.37%,and reduce the time by 70.71%.When compared with the genetic algorithm using the Sum of Squared Error Function,GAk-MEANS on average is able to reduce the size of the subset of selected features by 15.91%,and improve the accuracy by 9.81%,but the time is increased by a factor of 3.When compared with the machine-learning based methods,we observed that GAk-MEANS is able to increase the accuracy by 13.67%on average with an 88.76%average increase in time.

Bilateral co-transfer for unsupervised domain adaptation

Labeled data scarcity of an interested domain is often a serious problem in machine learning.Leveraging the labeled data from other semantic-related yet co-variate shifted source domain to facilitate the interested domain is a consensus.In order to solve the domain shift between domains and reduce the learning ambiguity,unsupervised domain adaptation(UDA)greatly promotes the transferability of model parameters.However,the dilemma of over-fitting(negative transfer)and under-fitting(under-adaptation)is always an overlooked challenge and potential risk.In this paper,we rethink the shallow learning paradigm and this intractable over/under-fitting problem,and propose a safer UDA model,coined as Bilateral Co-Transfer(BCT),which is essentially beyond previous well-known unilateral transfer.With bilateral co-transfer between domains,the risk of over/under-fitting is therefore largely reduced.Technically,the proposed BCT is a symmetrical structure,with joint distribution discrepancy(JDD)modeled for domain alignment and category discrimination.Specifically,a symmetrical bilateral transfer(SBT)loss between source and target domains is proposed under the philosophy of mutual checks and balances.First,each target sample is represented by source samples with low-rankness constraint in a common subspace,such that the most informative and transferable source data can be used to alleviate negative transfer.Second,each source sample is symmetrically and sparsely represented by target samples,such that the most reliable target samples can be exploited to tackle underadaptation.Experiments on various benchmarks show that our BCT outperforms many previous outstanding work.

Unsupervised Functional Data Clustering Based on Adaptive Weights

In recent years, functional data has been widely used in finance, medicine, biology and other fields. The current clustering analysis can solve the problems in finite-dimensional space, but it is difficult to be directly used for the clustering of functional data. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised clustering algorithm based on adaptive weights. In the absence of initialization parameter, we use entropy-type penalty terms and fuzzy partition matrix to find the optimal number of clusters. At the same time, we introduce a measure based on adaptive weights to reflect the difference in information content between different clustering metrics. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm has higher purity than some algorithms.

An Approach to Unsupervised Character Classification Based on Similarity Measure in Fuzzy Model

This paper presents a fuzzy logic approach to efficiently perform unsupervised character classification for improvement in robustness, correctness and speed of a character recognition system. The characters are first split into eight typographical categories. The classification scheme uses pattern matching to classify the characters in each category into a set of fuzzy prototypes based on a nonlinear weighted similarity function. The fuzzy unsupervised character classification, which is natural in the repre...

Unsupervised Quick Reduct Algorithm Using Rough Set Theory

Feature selection （FS） is a process to select features which are more informative. It is one of the important steps in knowledge discovery. The problem is that not all features are important. Some of the features may be redundant, and others may be irrelevant and noisy. The conventional supervised FS methods evaluate various feature subsets using an evaluation function or metric to select only those features which are related to the decision classes of the data under consideration. However, for many data mining applications, decision class labels are often unknown or incomplete, thus indicating the significance of unsupervised feature selection. However, in unsupervised learning, decision class labels are not provided. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised quick reduct （QR） algorithm using rough set theory. The quality of the reduced data is measured by the classification performance and it is evaluated using WEKA classifier tool. The method is compared with existing supervised methods and the result demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Intelligent Fault Diagnosis of Rotary Machinery Based on Unsupervised Multiscale Representation Learning

The performance of traditional vibration based fault diagnosis methods greatly depends on those hand- crafted features extracted using signal processing algo- rithms, which require significant amounts of domain knowledge and human labor, and do not generalize well to new diagnosis domains. Recently, unsupervised represen- tation learning provides an alternative promising solution to feature extraction in traditional fault diagnosis due to its superior learning ability from unlabeled data. Given that vibration signals usually contain multiple temporal struc- tures, this paper proposes a multiscale representation learning （MSRL） framework to learn useful features directly from raw vibration signals, with the aim to capture rich and complementary fault pattern information at dif- ferent scales. In our proposed approach, a coarse-grained procedure is first employed to obtain multiple scale signals from an original vibration signal. Then, sparse filtering, a newly developed unsupervised learning algorithm, is applied to automatically learn useful features from each scale signal, respectively, and then the learned features at each scale to be concatenated one by one to obtain multi- scale representations. Finally, the multiscale representa- tions are fed into a supervised classifier to achieve diagnosis results. Our proposed approach is evaluated using two different case studies： motor bearing and wind turbine gearbox fault diagnosis. Experimental results show that the proposed MSRL approach can take full advantages of the availability of unlabeled data to learn discriminative features and achieved better performance with higher accuracy and stability compared to the traditional approaches.

Unsupervised seismic facies analysis using sparse representation spectral clustering

Traditional unsupervised seismic facies analysis techniques need to assume that seismic data obey mixed Gaussian distribution.However,fi eld seismic data may not meet this condition,thereby leading to wrong classifi cation in the application of this technology.This paper introduces a spectral clustering technique for unsupervised seismic facies analysis.This algorithm is based on on the idea of a graph to cluster the data.Its kem is that seismic data are regarded as points in space,points can be connected with the edge and construct to graphs.When the graphs are divided,the weights of the edges between the different subgraphs are as low as possible,whereas the weights of the inner edges of the subgraph should be as high as possible.That has high computational complexity and entails large memory consumption for spectral clustering algorithm.To solve the problem this paper introduces the idea of sparse representation into spectral clustering.Through the selection of a small number of local sparse representation points,the spectral clustering matrix of all sample points is approximately represented to reduce the cost of spectral clustering operation.Verifi cation of physical model and fi eld data shows that the proposed approach can obtain more accurate seismic facies classification results without considering the data meet any hypothesis.The computing efficiency of this new method is better than that of the conventional spectral clustering method,thereby meeting the application needs of fi eld seismic data.

Color-texture based unsupervised segmentation using JSEG with fuzzy connectedness

Color quantization is bound to lose spatial information of color distribution. If too much necessary spatial distribution information of color is lost in JSEG, it is difficult or even impossible for JSEG to segment image correctly. Enlightened from segmentation based on fuzzy theories, soft class-map is constracted to solve that problem. The definitions of values and other related ones are adjusted according to the soft class-map. With more detailed values obtained from soft class map, more color distribution information is preserved. Experiments on a synthetic image and many other color images illustrate that JSEG with soft class-map can solve efficiently the problem that in a region there may exist color gradual variation in a smooth transition. It is a more robust method especially for images which haven＇ t been heavily blurred near boundaries of underlying regions.

An unsupervised clustering method for nuclear magnetic resonance transverse relaxation spectrums based on the Gaussian mixture model and its application

To make the quantitative results of nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR) transverse relaxation(T;) spectrums reflect the type and pore structure of reservoir more directly, an unsupervised clustering method was developed to obtain the quantitative pore structure information from the NMR T;spectrums based on the Gaussian mixture model(GMM). Firstly, We conducted the principal component analysis on T;spectrums in order to reduce the dimension data and the dependence of the original variables. Secondly, the dimension-reduced data was fitted using the GMM probability density function, and the model parameters and optimal clustering numbers were obtained according to the expectation-maximization algorithm and the change of the Akaike information criterion. Finally, the T;spectrum features and pore structure types of different clustering groups were analyzed and compared with T;geometric mean and T;arithmetic mean. The effectiveness of the algorithm has been verified by numerical simulation and field NMR logging data. The research shows that the clustering results based on GMM method have good correlations with the shape and distribution of the T;spectrum, pore structure, and petroleum productivity, providing a new means for quantitative identification of pore structure, reservoir grading, and oil and gas productivity evaluation.

A NEW UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHM FOR POLARIMETRIC SAR IMAGES BASED ON FUZZY SET THEORY

In this letter, a new method is proposed for unsupervised classification of terrain types and man-made objects using POLarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) data. This technique is a combi-nation of the usage of polarimetric information of SAR images and the unsupervised classification method based on fuzzy set theory. Image quantization and image enhancement are used to preprocess the POLSAR data. Then the polarimetric information and Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm are used to classify the preprocessed images. The advantages of this algorithm are the automated classification, its high classifica-tion accuracy, fast convergence and high stability. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated by ex-periments using SIR-C/X-SAR (Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) data.

Unsupervised Feature Selection for Latent Dirichlet Allocation

As a generative model,Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model,which lacks optimization of topics' discrimination capability focuses on how to generate data,This paper aims to improve the discrimination capability through unsupervised feature selection.Theoretical analysis shows that the discrimination capability of a topic is limited by the discrimination capability of its representative words.The discrimination capability of a word is approximated by the Information Gain of the word for topics,which is used to distinguish between "general word" and "special word" in LDA topics.Therefore,we add a constraint to the LDA objective function to let the "general words" only happen in "general topics" other than "special topics".Then a heuristic algorithm is presented to get the solution.Experiments show that this method can not only improve the information gain of topics,but also make the topics easier to understand by human.